Fig. 1: Highly-resolved topographic STM image and the tunneling spectrum (STS) curves measured on ZrSiTe surface.

a–c Different types of semimetals. The Dirac semimetal with fourfold degeneracy Dirac point (a); the Weyl semimetal with double-fold degeneracy Weyl point and show up in pairs with different chirality (b); the nodal line semimetal with crossing points formed a closed loop in the BZ (c). d High-resolution STM topography image of a cleaved ZrSiTe surface, illustrating the square Te lattice of ZrSiTe. The image parameters are V_bias = −20 mV, I_set = 300 pA. The image size is 50 nm × 50 nm. (Inset) Crystal structure of ZrSiTe with the cleavage plane between the Zr-Te layers. e, f Enlarged STM images of two types of surface defects extracted from d, sort as Te vacancy (e) and Te adatom (f), respectively. The size is 4 nm × 4 nm for both images. g Hundreds of dI/dV spectra (green) measured at different locations on the bare surface areas (away from the defects) and the averaged spectrum (black) (V_bias = 20 mV, I_set = 300 pA, lock-in V_mod = 3 mV). h STS curves were measured in different areas (marked as α, β, and γ in Fig. 1d). All the data are measured at 4.2 K.